Matrix by Lauren Groff

Unless I’m completely misremembering, it’s been a few months since I last read any straightforward literary historical fiction… It’s something I used to read a lot of.

So, no, this isn’t a novelisation.

In contrast to the 1997 blockbuster with which it shares a name (sans article), Lauren Groff’s Matrix is not set in a distant future where robot bastards have taken over the world and imprisoned almost all living people as sources of electricity in weird little pods, anaesthetising their urges and needs for freedom by convincing them they are instead living full lives inside a computer generated simulation of a (slightly) better world, it is instead set in the medieval period where Catholic, royalist, patriarchal bastards have taken over the world and imprisoned almost all living people as sources of manual labour in weird little villages, anaesthetising their urges and needs for freedom by convincing them that they are instead living in a divinely created and maintained world of order, miracles, and holy holy [insert noun later].

There is, though, shared in both texts, a messianic protagonist who rebels against the strictures and structures of the powerful (royalty and the Church in one, the robots and their agents in the other) and does so by gaining huge amounts of power within the very infrastructures meant to keep them docile and unresponsive: in The Matrix this means becoming very very very good at fighting inside the computer generated fake reality, while in Matrix this means becoming very very very good at administrating an abbey.

Yes, this is a 300 page novel about someone running an abbey.

The protagonist is an illegitimate daughter of royalty, too physically large / conventionally unattractive to be easily marriaged off, so is instead sent away – basically to rot – in a plague ridden impoverished abbey somewhere deep in awful England.

Unfortunately, though (or fortunately!), Marie (that’s her name) absolutely fucking thrives, and the cash injection that comes from the crown to buy her place in the abbey she puts to great use and, over the course of a lifetime career running a women-only religious institute that is simultaneously hospice, prison and factor, Marie increases the economic and cultural power of the institution, buying up land, creating new revenue streams, investing in buildings and physical infrastructure, increasing the knowledge base and thus self sufficiency of the nuns, not only improving their farming, construction, landlording and scribe/book copying businesses, but also building defensive earthworks and leading a violent defense against a local group of men who try to attack the abbey to e.g. put the local rich women back in their place.

There’s also lots about queer desire and romance, lots about the pursuit of power and the ridiculousness of the sexist and chauvinistic norms and standards of the medieval period and the Church as it continues to exist today…

Lots about hypocrisy and about creativity, about inspiration and about purpose, about memories and re-telling personal narratives, about myth and legend and about Catholicism and relics and the Crusades and European wars and geopolitics of the medieval period…

Groff’s protagonist may be (slightly) recognisable to anyone who has dived even shallowly into the pools of pre-modern literature as she is Marie de France, the author of those “lais” I vaguely remember not enjoying during my first term studying an English literature degree an obscenely long time ago. (Yes, yes, sure, I am basically so old that the lais of Marie de France was “contemporary writing” when I was a teenager. Yes, sure.)

This isn’t a biography, though, it is a novel.

And it’s an engaging and serious example of a traditional and long-considered important type of fiction – literary historical.

Is there anything here that feels groundbreaking or fresh, in terms of structure, content or narrative? No, not at all. But to expect every novel to be doing something new and exciting is to fundamentally misunderstand what and how artistic forms rise, are maintained and continue.

This is a great piece of literary historical fiction, but as is starkly emphasised by a short story included as a “bonus” in this edition, Matrix is part of a (small-c) conservative literary tradition (almost certainly referred to as “liberal” in the United States), so if you’re looking for something to blow your socks off, this isn’t it.

Good, solid, well put-together and with a great oscillating pacing that tracks through some decades with less attention than some hours, but that’s life, really, innit, it’s not length of time that makes something matter. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t just time.

A great example of a type of book of which there have been great examples for centuries. Worth a read, absolutely (!), but of its type and both lifted and limited by the constraints of its genre.